by John Maclay
Sunday. My whole new life shattered, I hated to realize, just as my old one had been. Forced myself to unlock the back door, step out into the yard, look up at the sickly sun, try for peace again with nature. To look at the green, harmless growth, try again for its help as I’d thought maybe I could do. Sunday was the day for it, if any was. Scanned the hedges, the blue sky, the branches of the big tree. And its strong trunk. And at the base, not strong like it, or as I’d almost been, something else. The gray fungus. The squishy thing. Fully three feet across, and almost seeming to grow, as I watched it, toward me.
Sunday night. Sat watching HBO, but couldn’t keep my mind on the movie. My thoughts kept coming back to…the fungus. Decided it wasn’t normal, not at all. About eleven o’clock, realized I was breathing too fast, my heart racing. Surprised to find it wasn’t from sounds outside or in the house, which I’d barely heard. Instead, the damned fungus. It seemed to fill my cloudy eyes, my whole brain. Finally pulled myself out of the chair, turned off the TV, went to the kitchen, came back with a six-pack of beer. It didn’t help. Stayed up all night, my mind, my fears, focused on that one gray thing in the yard. But decided, at about six A.M., that in a crazy way my obsession wasn’t all bad. At least, in place of the hundred smaller ones, I now had one great fear. Before I dropped off to sleep on the sofa, told myself I’d conquer it.
Monday. Yesterday. A really beautiful day. Up at last at noon, and out into the yard. The fungus a bit smaller. I wondered strangely if it was enough.
Monday night. Hadn’t done anything all afternoon but brood about the fungus. Wondered if I was going insane. To be thinking, as I was now, that somehow all my terrors, real and imagined, since my wife had died, were now embodied, had mysteriously grown up, in that gray, loathsome, amorphous thing…
Monday night, late. Longed for someone to talk to. Marcia. She’d been, it finally came to me, my shield against all of it. The fears that civilization brought, the rowdy kids, the real criminals. She’d conquered them, not by some stupid routine like mine, but by the right contact with nature. The one women could have. The one I apparently couldn’t, much as I’d started to try. Remembered her kneeling, gardening, helping the green things. Giving them strength, taking it back into herself, extending it to me. The way she might have done with a child, if we’d had one. Laughed sickly to myself. All I could grow alone, with my macho facade, my little-boy weakness, was something horrible, and gray.
Monday night, later. Hadn’t had anything to eat all day. Sleep out of the question. Took a walk through the house, the empty rooms. Lay down drained on the sofa. Decided to forget about the “woman” idea. All very well, but it didn’t help now. The fungus to deal with. My growth, my fears. And the chilling new thought I’d had. That the thing did more than contain them. That when I was strong, like at the end of last night, it would seem to have shrunk, like today. And when I was weak, like now…
Tuesday. Today. Must have dozed off. Woke to mid-morning sunlight, to drag myself to the kitchen, eat breakfast, write most of this out. And see frightfully where I’d been, where I was going. Too far inside myself to wonder if I was insane or not, or why this awful thing, this living concentrate of fears, had somehow come to me. Because, while cooking my eggs, I’d had the ultimate thought. That if my terrors, the contents of my lost, lonely mind, should suddenly break loose…
Noon. Willed myself to stand up, stumble across the floor, look out the kitchen window. Fully aware of all the fears I’d had since the last time I saw the fungus, And, if my theory held true, released. Into it. Looked slowly down at the base of the tree. Can’t describe what I felt. Can only give measurements. Ten feet. And growing. Slowly, but perceptibly, its outer membrane stretching. Growing. Toward the house.
One o’clock. Frozen in the kitchen, eyes glued to the swelling thing, trying to be rational, think what to do. Call that smooth-faced cop? Ridiculous. Probably wouldn’t even be able to see it, would lock me away as an old nut who spent too much time alone. The neighbors? Still away on vacation. Ached again for Marcia. She’d have known. Remembering her, looked up at the bright sun, tried to ask it, ask nature, one last time for help. But decided it was too late. All up to me.
Three o’clock. Shuffling around the house, smiling weakly. Recalling the past two hours. How with my last strength I’d torn myself away from the window, bolted out the back door, grabbed the old shovel. Rushed the thing, like some John Wayne commando. Probed it, hacked at it, all the while telling myself everything I’d thought had been wrong, that it was just some stupid growth. But it hadn’t been. The shovel had bounced back, again and again, finally leaping out of my weakening hands. And the fungus. As I’d stood there panting, it had stopped for a moment, maybe shrunk an inch. But then, its springy surface rippling, mocking me, it had started. Growing. Again.
Four o’clock. Suddenly, randomly, thought of the old F.D.R. quote, from my youth in the ’30’s. “Nothing to fear but fear itself.” All in the mind, he’d said. Even the fears you found to be real could be willed down, made unreal. Strangely heartening. Began to hope against hope it was true in my awful case. That even the horrible gray thing could be, or could be made to be, just the ultimate creature of my sick mind, real as I thought I’d found it. And if I could not only stop my terrors from breaking loose, but keep new ones from feeding it, and even start to pull the old ones back inside me…
Five o’clock. An hour ago. The hour before spent lying tensed on the sofa, in superhuman concentration. My head pounding. Reaching deeper inside myself than I ever had before. Telling myself to be strong. To be a man, not just in body, but in mind. Not to be consumed, literally, by my fears. Telling myself that even in this truly dangerous civilization, even without my woman’s always-natural help, though I longed for it, I could survive. Could then start again to try to find the better thing that Marcia had…
Twilight. Waking from a nightmare. Of the fungus, all my fears released into it. Inflating, Filling the whole, dying yard. Reaching into the house. Gray. Amorphous. Pulsating. Coming. For me.
Now. Rising, stretching, walking to the kitchen window. Looking out. Everything silent, peaceful in the dim light. Casually glancing down. The thing tiny, almost unnoticeable, quivering there in the evening.
Real…but something I can easily root out tomorrow.
And, like all the monsters of my mind, throw away.
WIDOWED
At fifty-six, Don was on his own again, struggling to get through the days and nights in the half-empty suburban house. Half-empty, because Martha wasn’t there anymore. And more than half, because their two daughters had grown up and left a dozen years before.
Like all men, he hadn’t thought his wife would die before he did. But Martha had, last year, and he still couldn’t believe it. They’d always had yearly check-ups, but the cancer had come so suddenly and taken her so swiftly.
Don had taken early retirement from his engineer’s job so he could spend every minute with her to the end. Now, though, that decision presented a problem, because he had no occupation to counter his loneliness. He’d spent a few weeks with his daughters and their families, but nice as they’d been, he’d felt like a fifth wheel. He’d tried playing golf and doing some volunteer work to get out of the house. But when he came home at night, there’d been only the TV and the empty side of the sofa, the painful reminder of his loss.
Nor was he an old man who could fade into a retirement community. He was gray-haired and gray-bearded, but otherwise in the greatest shape of his life.
His old friends from work had been supportive at first, but as human nature went, they’d gradually stopped calling him. The neighbors were still pleasant, but he couldn’t help thinking they’d rather such an obviously suffering man wasn’t among them. What relatives he had, other than his daughters, lived far away.
Luckily, there was Bill, a now-divorced college buddy who’d decided to make a sort of project of him. So wh
en he really couldn’t stand it anymore, he put himself in Bill’s hands.
“First off, you’ve got to move,” Bill told him over lunch. “Being alone in that house will drive you nuts.”
So, with his friend’s help, Don put the house on the market, soon found a buyer, and bought a one-bedroom condo in a high-rise building downtown. He even replaced all the old furniture.
“How do you feel?” Bill asked him, a week after the move, as they sat in the living room.
“It’s scary,” Don replied. “Now I don’t have any reminders of Martha. And while I don’t rattle around anymore, I’m still alone here.”
His buddy looked at him for a long moment, apparently expecting him to make the next leap of logic.
“Oh, it’s too soon for me to find…someone else,” Don said, taking the hint. “What would Martha…what would my daughters say?”
“I think they’d say, for a man in your position, it’s about time,” Bill replied. “And quite frankly, when you do, it’ll be a load off everybody’s mind!”
The dates, set up by Bill, turned out to be with much younger women. The first time Don brought one back to his condo and summoned the courage to sleep with her as she wanted, it was exciting, a kind of fantasy fulfillment after so many years of fidelity to his wife. It made him feel younger, too.
But he couldn’t help deciding that this, indeed, wasn’t what Martha would have wanted. And the next time they met, he told his friend so.
“This may be okay for you, but it isn’t for me,” he said. “I need the kind of mature woman I’ve lost.”
“That’s fine,” Bill said. “At least I’ve got you started looking again, solving your loneliness, betting on life. But buddy, the older ones just aren’t my department, so you’re on your own.”
Don decided to accept the challenge. And that same afternoon, when the idea suddenly, almost preternaturally came to him and before he could think twice, he phoned Lenore.
Lenore was a college friend of his and Martha’s. They’d kept in touch over the years, and he and Lenore had exchanged notes when her husband, Mark, had died a few months after his wife.
The last time he’d seen her, a few years back, she’d been remarkably well-preserved for a woman in her fifties. Her hair was still brown with only a hint of gray, her face still attractive, her figure busty and voluptuous and her limbs smooth, white, and toned.
“Listen,” he said over the phone, after some small talk. “I was wondering if we could get together.”
“I’m not sure what you mean by that,” Lenore replied, in her deep alto, making him wonder if his voice had made his intention too obvious. “But yes. We could.”
So the next weekend, Don got his car out of the condo garage and drove the hundred miles to the small town where she lived. He found that she, too, with her children grown and her husband gone, had moved to a more modest place, an apartment in a rambling Victorian house.
In a long, flower-print dress, Lenore still looked great. She gave him a hug, her full breasts pressing his chest, and an unmistakably lusty smile.
She motioned him to a sofa with a lot of cushions, and sat down beside him. A bottle of wine and two glasses were on a table in front of them, and she opened the bottle and poured.
As they drank, he looked around the room. It was decorated in an exotic, hothouse style, with antiques, tapestries, and paintings. And there were sensuous statues and carved, mystic symbols.
Noticing his reaction, Lenore explained.
“Mark and I got into some interesting things after the children left,” she said. “You and Martha didn’t know that.”
She was exactly what he’d told Bill he wanted, Don instantly knew. A mature woman, with a past and now a hint of mystery, too. So, fortified by the wine, he made the speech he’d rehearsed in the car.
“I’ve been pretty lonely,” he said. “I’ve met a few women, but it hasn’t been any good. And I was wondering if it hasn’t been the same with you. I thought at least we could talk it out with each other. I’m sure you’ve found someone else, looking like you do, but we could be friends. We could sort of go back to when we were younger, and take it up from there.”
Lenore smiled broadly, and her brown eyes viewed him kindly.
“You haven’t dated since the Reagan administration, have you?” she said. “And as far as going back is concerned, people our age had better go for what’s now, my friend.”
Then she reached out and touched his shoulder, and he moved to her.
Don hadn’t remotely hoped it would happen so fast. As they kissed hotly, the coat and tie he’d rather stupidly worn for his visit fell away, followed by everything else. Just as quickly, Lenore’s truly remarkable figure was revealed.
As he followed her to the bedroom, which was also opulently decorated, he decided he’d found the best of all possible worlds. She still had a great body, but there was so much more.
She tossed the silk covers aside and lay back, her arms over her head and her breasts rising. She opened to him below.
They made love urgently, even desperately, bringing it to a swift, though incredibly satisfying end. During it, he was able to think it was a purging of their loneliness, and a negation of the deaths of their spouses. He was also, quite frankly, fascinated by the fact that he was finally making it with someone he’d known for more than thirty years.
But more than that, there was Lenore’s amazing self. And when it was over, as he lay beside her caressing her naked curves, he told her.
“You should have many lovers,” he said. “You’re too good to keep it to one man, or to be alone.”
“Well, maybe I have had,” she replied, again mysteriously, as she undulated under his touch. “Or at least in my mind. But perhaps I was waiting for you.”
Don spent the rest of the weekend in her apartment, and in her bed. He hadn’t had such a prolonged sexual experience, shutting out everything else, since his honeymoon with Martha. But on Monday morning, if for no other reason than to rest, he sensed he should drive back home.
“You’ve got a live one,” his buddy Bill told him, after he confessed everything over lunch on Tuesday. “If you ask me, she and her husband must have been swingers, at least in their ‘golden’ years. She might be into even kinkier things, especially since he died. If I were you, I’d be careful.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Don replied defensively, just wanting to accept this woman as the perfect partner he’d found.
But on his next visit, he bore in mind what Bill had said.
It was true. When he looked into Lenore’s eyes, he detected a knowledge of something strange, a knowledge beyond what just her maturity should have lent her.
And when, in the after-sex moment he’d always regarded as mystical, he lay beside her, reviewing what had been his thoughts and visions during their encounter, he knew he’d shared that knowledge. It had been communicated to him through their merging much more deeply than it could have been through words.
Though he didn’t want to admit it, Don had been to scary places. He’d seen not a future for Lenore and himself, but a horrible past. This time, the sex hadn’t been a negation of their spouses’ deaths. Instead, it had been a revisiting, a horrible confirmation.
In short, he’d seen death itself. It had been presented in the form of a tableau, a phantasmagoria, that had been just beneath the surface of his erotic visions.
The tableau had been Breughelesque, a dance of live people with skeletons under a wan sky!
He turned to Lenore, viewing her naked body not with pleasure but with alarm now, and came right out with it.
“Did you see it, too?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
“Oh, yes, I always do,” she replied.
“Did you want to show me?”
“It doesn’t matter whether I wanted to or not. You w
ould have seen it sooner or later, because it’s in you, too.”
“And the dance. We’re the live people, and your husband and my wife are the skeletons?”
“Apparently. And if it’s not too far-fetched, I think the vision may come from our dead spouses. Or at least from the nightmares we’ve had about them being dead.”
Don hadn’t had such actual nightmares, but he knew he would now. And he wondered if those nightmares were shared by all four of them, the two dead and the two living.
“But do they want us to see these things?” he asked Lenore. “I hate to say it, but that would be pretty cruel.”
“I don’t think they have any control over it,” she replied.
Then she rose from the bed, walked to the closet, and put on a flowing black robe. He was secretly glad to see her voluptuous body disappear, because now it was as much a problem as a delight to him.
He dressed, and followed her to the living room, where it was obvious they’d talk further.
“Your things,” he said, gesturing to the antiques, the statues, and especially the mystic symbols. “Are these part of it?”
“Not really,” she answered. “Though Mark and I weren’t exactly conventional, as you may have guessed. No, I think that only made me more open to what I, and now you, have found.”
“And that is?” he asked, dreading her reply.
“An obsession with death. And I’ve come to believe, much as we still look good and much as we try to think otherwise, that it’s a proper obsession. And when we have sex, it isn’t inconsistent with what the Renaissance poets wrote: that sex is a ‘little death.’”
“But I’ve always thought sex was life,” Don said.
“It is,” Lenore replied, with a thin smile. “But for us, in our situation, it just isn’t.
“Because,” she said, driving an incredible chill through him as he sat beside her on the sofa, “We’re virtually dead, too, because of our loss.”
